Joni Mitchell’s simple 21 word songwriting maxim
Joni Mitchell has had a unique experience in recent years. Following a brain aneurysm in 2015, the iconic artist became a stranger to her own work. Alongside having to relearn the basics of walking and talking, she had to relearn her whole discography, rediscovering her lyrics and voice, reminding herself of her art, and essentially meeting her lifetime of creativity as if it were separate from her. But really, nothing could be more in keeping with her philosophy.
For as long as Mitchell has been around as an artist, a label has haunted her – ‘confessional’. She hates that. “I feel when somebody calls me a confessional songwriter that they’ve missed the point,” she said back in the day. She explained it further, adding, “When I read ‘confessional style’ in print, there’s something in the tone of the way it is delivered that is kind of insulting, like you’ve flashed in a public place or something, when in fact you are attempting to illuminate the human condition.”
To her, the label ‘confessional’ is belittling. It removes the power, worth and value of the art and minimises it to little more than a diary entry, as if Mitchell’s music is simply her spilling secrets of her life rather than a product of her talent and skill, her knack for words and her interest in playing with them.
“There’s too much emphasis put on the artist and not enough on the art,” she said, adding, “I prefer to be like the Wizard of Oz, where you just see what I’ve created and I’m invisible.”
And then 2015 hit, and suddenly, Mitchell was more like the Wizard of Oz, but to herself. Now presented with decades’ worth of work that she’d forgotten, she had the unique experience of engaging with her art from an outsider perspective as she relearned it.
Brandi Carlile was by her side for that as a close confidante and essential friend, encouraging her to get back to her music. “I’ve been fortunate enough to sit beside Joni as she relearned her own lyrics. Something about seeing them in written form makes them even more brilliant,” Carlile said of that experience.
But even if the art needed to be remembered, the ethos of the artist did not as Carlile recalled Mitchell’s 21 words that her whole career was lived by, and that she could always hold onto – “If you see me in my music, I haven’t done my job, but if you see yourself, my job is done.”
It captures so much about Mitchell as an artist, a public figure and a person. It speaks to her rejection of the idea of the ‘confessional’, refuting the fact that her music is merely intimacies from her life. But it also speaks to her desire to have the personal elements of her music be adopted into the universal, knowing the power that specificity can have for the collective. In the sharing of herself, she wants the world to see a mirror, not just a page of her diary.
